At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

When paints became popular, people wanted them to be as vivid as they could possibly be made. The restrained colors that we associate with the Georgian period in Britain, or the colonial period in America, are a consequence of fading, not decorative restraint. In 1979, when Mount Vernon began a program of repainting the interiors in faithful colors, “people came and just yelled at us,” Dennis Pogue, the curator, told me with a grin. “They told us we were making Mount Vernon garish. They were right—we were. But that’s just because that’s the way it was. It was hard for a lot of people to accept that what we were doing was faithful restoration. “Even now paint charts for colonial-style paints virtually always show the colors from the period as muted. In fact, colors were actually nearly always quite deep and sometimes even startling. The richer a color you could get, the more you tended to be admired. For one thing, rich colors generally denoted expense, since you needed a lot of pigment to make them. Also, you need to remember that often these colors were seen by candlelight, so they needed to be more forceful to have any kind of impact in muted light.”